


What Had Once Been My Life

by ryssabeth



Series: Metropolitan Art [12]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Homeless Character, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 18:08:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1122783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryssabeth/pseuds/ryssabeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything he'd ever been is in that backpack.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Had Once Been My Life

Clouds chug silently across the night sky—and sleep keeps hovering at the edge of his eyes, creating a tunnel out of his vision, but it stays at bay. His backpack is pillowed behind his head, as it’s been for the last year of his life, and he’s relatively comfortable. As comfortable has he’s been able to be, sleeping on benches at Metro stations and bus stops and—like tonight—in parks.

(But he doesn’t usually mind it—there’s no other pressure except  _get food, go home_ , and drink, on occasion—more than on occasion.

He didn’t mind it much at all.

 _But then Enjolras had looked at him like that._ )

Grantaire reaches for the cap to pull over his eyes—but it’s not there, and he stops halfway in the short distance that he has to go. (Enjolras has his cap—and he hates the fact, a little bit, that his chest alights with warmth at that.) His hand falls back down, his arm wrapping around his stomach.

Regret sits on his tongue, a bitter pill (the way he imagines the colour yellow would taste). But classes had dug claws into him, striking bone and clamping down. And he’d panicked. (Grantaire has never dealt properly with stress and, he supposes, dropping out had just confirmed all the things he’d said to himself all along.)

( _“Don’t look at me like that.”_ )

Grantaire shuts his eyes against the starlight, swallowing the bitter bile in his throat.

And he sees Enjolras.

( _“Don’t look at me at all, if you’re going to look like that.”_ )

He rolls onto his side, facing toward the grass and the bushes.

And he tries to sleep.

-

( _“Don’t look at me like that.”_ )

Today, politically speaking, had been a successful one. The sea of people had only grown larger as lunchtime came and went. Employees took their sick leave and called in, joining the growing mass of angry people at the stairs of the Parliament building, raising their voices against the unjust rise in taxes that would be going nowhere—adversely affecting not only the middle class, but the poor as well.

(And the poor—they were  _outraged_.)

Their protest—which had been planned as something smaller than it turned into—had made the four o’clock news. And the six o’clock. And the politicians had had to walk a silent gauntlet (very silent,  _achingly_  silent) of angry people, in a single file line to where they had to hail cabs or walk home or get their cars from the carpark down the road.

They’d been suitably terrified and suitably cowed—for the moment, at any rate.

And Enjolras is  _proud_  of this. He’s proud of it as the sun sets—he’s proud of it as he embraces his friends, as he walks to his flat, and as he unlocks his door. He’s  _proud_  of it. And he knows that part of it—the collection of the homeless that live in Paris, the collection of the poor, outraged and angry and  _remarkable_ , that? That was all Grantaire’s idea. His advice. (And, suddenly, the advice all makes sense. It’s more than just cynicism—it’s experience.)  And Enjolras had genuinely helped people—Enjolras can help him too, he  _can_ , why didn’t Grantaire just  _trust_  him—

Betrayal grabs one of his ribs and cracks it, holding it aloft and away from the rest of his chest before shoving the serrated edge of the broken bone against his lungs. He tosses his keys onto his kitchen counter as he passes it, taking brisk steps down the hallway, breathing past the hiss of anger that wants to push its way past his teeth.

(He’s not even completely sure why he’s  _this_  angry—is he angry, really, at Grantaire for keeping it a secret?

Or is he angry at himself for not  _seeing_  it?

 _“Do you_ own _another coat?”_ )

The hiss of anger turns into a sigh—turns into nothing and becomes a simple breath as he nudges the door of his room open with his toes. (And he thinks of the sensation of lips against his nose when he’d asked for a phone number—a phone number that couldn’t be given because he doesn’t have a phone— _I am such an idiot_ ,  _I—_ )

He flips on the overhead light, and he considers his options. Outrage—apparently—was not the proper route to take. When he sees Grantaire, next time (because, despite the fact that they don’t live together, Eponine and Grantaire are close—incredibly close and it is likely that next time they meet at Eponine’s, which certainly they will to celebrate making the news, he will be there), he’ll apologise. He’ll apologise and—and then they’ll talk, or something, perhaps. ( _And I can help—I can fix this, I—_ )

Enjolras reaches for the cap in his back pocket, missing the warmth of the fabric, keeping his hair manageable beneath it, at least a little.

And his hand curls around nothing.

(Ah, all right—he must have dropped it on the walk to the room.)

Enjolras turns (flicking out the light—electricity is important to save) and retraces his steps from the doorway, eyes to the floor, looking for the knit cap. It isn’t in the hallway, or outside the kitchen. It isn’t in front of the door, or outside it. Or, from what he can see as he peers outside his door, down the stairs.

His trainers, luckily, are still on his feet and he only steps back inside to grab his keys (flipping off the lightswitches as he goes) to lock the door behind him as he trots down the stairs, looking for the cap that Grantaire had placed upon his head.

(It isn’t on the stairs.)

And it isn’t on the sidewalk outside his complex—and it isn’t on the path he’d taken away from the Parliament building. (Admittedly, the path is lengthy and he dislikes taking the Metro, most days—today had been no different.)

Halfway down the route he’d taken home, panic pierces into his bones—because that cap was a  _gift_. Is he really so  _stupid_ , so insensitive as to lose a gift that someone ( _someone with so little to give_ ) had given him?

(He likes that cap—likes the way it presses against his hair, the way it smells like cheap detergent and the wind, likes—

Likes the fact that Grantaire gave it to him, of all people.

Because he didn’t have a phone number to give instead.)

The streetlamps light up the street and space outside the Parliament building, and Enjolras paces, back and forth, back and forth, the extensive distance that he’d wandered through when he’d been inciting the fires of political disdain in the people. But—but no matter where he looks, or steps, or how high he gets to look across the space, there’s no sign of the cap that Grantaire had given him.

( _It must’ve fallen out of my pocket, it must have—it must’ve—_ )

 _“More like a token_.”

Enjolras puts his hand over his mouth, sitting down upon a bench to catch his breath—because the rib that had been snapped before is broken again.

And this time, the hand that breaks open his chest walks away with it, leaving a hole for his heart to beat through, flopping uselessly upon the ground as he wonders how he got so attached to a silly looking cap and realises it was the person he was attached to—

And it’s very much like losing a piece of him.

-

What wakes Grantaire isn’t anything good—and he knows that that is the case because if the sun isn’t waking him up, it’s either the police or something equally unseemly. What woke him up this time was his head hitting the bench where his backpack had been resting—and the footsteps of someone tearing away, his things rattling in the knapsack that had been stolen from him.

He’s up and running before his brain truly catches up with the rest of him, trailing a squat man whose arms are clutched tightly around Grantaire’s backpack, the straps held together with duct tape bouncing as he runs. (And it’s difficult to tell in light like this, but Grantaire might know him, from one shelter or another—Grantaire never stays in one if he can help it, and  _never_  stays in one more than once at a time.)

He’s lucky, he supposes, that he knows Paris so well, and walks it so often—he can anticipate the man’s turns and keep pace with him (he wouldn’t call himself athletic—but he can hop a fence with little trouble, though that is hardly necessary now).

They’re streaking toward the artists’ strip, along the edge of the Seine, opposite the Eiffel Tower—a decision more for safety than anything else. The clog of tourists on the Eiffel side would be unfortunate if all the artists and sellers were there too.

This late at night—though Grantaire doesn’t know the time, specifically—the stalls are empty, the spaces between them seeming wider without the clutter of wares and things.

The thief sprints toward one of the footbridges, his breath coming out in desperate gasps. Grantaire pursues, his own lungs uncomfortable, but not lost to the sensation of a good run (it was the police, more than once, for sleeping in a tree in a park—). The thief hooks a turn, a little too early, where he ends up facing the railing of the footbridge as Grantaire’s fingers curl around the fabric of the man’s shirt, gripping like a vice.

The man stops.

The knapsack in his arms, however, does not.

It’s like something out of a film, it seems like—the slow motion of the barely-held-together backpack slipping from the man’s arms, sliding against the surface of the cement railings, before slipping over the edge and into the Seine below, the churning waters swallowing up the backpack, carrying it away from sight.

( _Inertia_  he remembers the word from secondary school.  _Inertia._ )

His hand is still viced in the man’s shirt—and Grantaire  _pulls_  tossing the man to the ground, falling upon him, one leg on either side of the man’s hips as he holds his fist, ready to throw it against the man’s face until he feels better—until the fact that  _everything he owns_  was in that bag stops hurting so much.

(That was his life—that was his  _existence_ , in one bag. His sketches— _of Enjolras, of the hijabi, of_ —his pencils—and charcoal pencils are so expensive, that was his  _last_  one—his fucking  _toothbrush_ —)

That was his life.

And that, he knows, is pathetic.

The man cowers, his face pale with fear. But Grantaire drops his fist, standing up instead, tucking his thumbs into his beltloops as he looks down upon the shaking mass of human skin on the stone footbridge.

“There wasn’t any money in that.” Grantaire’s voice doesn’t sound like his own, sounds exhausted, sounds dry—sounds like  _nothing_. “There was a sketchpad, pencils, and a toothbrush. Congratulations.” ( _Congratulations, that’s all you’ve managed to collect in your lifetime that wasn’t repossessed when you stopped going back to your flat._ )

His wallet is something small—made of cardboard and duct tape by his sister when he was fourteen and that was still cool. He hadn’t ever had the heart to get rid of it, and these days it suits him just fine. All it has, tucked away in his back left pocket, is his student ID card (useless, now, and expired) and his driver’s license (too expensive to renew).

The man looks less aghast and more disappointed.

And Grantaire leaves him there, walking back the way he’d come, his back not weighed down with the little life he’d built for himself.

(And, he thinks, he has some favours he could call in—there are people that owe him booze, a good bottle of whiskey. Perhaps a place to sleep.)

Grantaire reaches for his cap to cover up his eyes, stinging with wetness.

But there’s nothing there to grab.

(That doesn’t make him feel warm, anymore.)


End file.
